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How can input clear button be hidden if IE10 is being run in IE7, IE8, or IE9 modes?

Question

A customer has requested that the IE10's new clear button not appear on input boxes in our application. Microsoft and others indicate that a way to remove it is to use the ::-ms-clear pseudo-element, as shown below:

INPUT::-ms-clear

{

width : 0;

height: 0;

}

However, this only works if the browser is running in IE10 mode.

Our application has been in production for a number of years. It turns out that our application is incompatible with IE10 in various areas. Our simple fix was to run it in IE8 mode, i.e. add this line to the top of every page:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE-EmulateIE8"

The result is that the input clear button is still there.

In IE10 mode, the button disappears - but our application won't work in this mode.

The conceptual question is: if these other modes (like IE8) allows IE10 to operate like IE8 andthus not recognize pseudo-elements like "::-ms-clear", then why would it still display the clear button?

The practical questions are 1) Can Microsoft change its browser code so that the input clear button (and the other new buttons) don't appear if the browser is running in some "earlier" mode, and 2) Can Microsoft device a way to programatically
eliminate the input clear button for browsers running in these earlier modes?